medic611 said:
Having worked in the area for 15 years yes there are still dead spots even having UHF. Considering there are 3 departments using the columbus system for mutual aid/ hospital reports it would be nice to carry just one radio. As an example Greenfield TWP ( Carroll) has MARCS radios and has a dispatch TG and a fireground TG. How do i know this I installed the radios while working a shift up there . It is nice to switch from a columbus tg to SO 23 all in a single radio. Those radios were all purchased with EMS grant money,rumor has it more grant money is going to be given out like the first round, a simple filling out the paperwork worked for that department.
That's what is sort of dumb about Union County switching to MARCS. Now that they have done so, guess what? They have one more kind of portable radio, and one more mobile radio installed in their vehicles. As far as I know, they don't even (yet) have the Columbus system programmed in their MARCS radios; Jerome is still carrying MTS2000s in their apparatus for mutual aid. Further, Washington township doesn't have MARCS radios, so when they are on a mutual aid run with Jerome, it's 154.250 baby. And no, the last time that happened, the dispatcher did not set up a VHF-MARCS patch.
It would be excellent to only have one kind of radio, but I'm sure not holding my breath for anything like that to happen soon.